


On 'Steadfast' and 'Immutable' Not Being Equivalent to One Another

by charleybradburies



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Analysis, Canon Timeline, Character Analysis, Character Development, Doomed Relationship, Doomed Timelines, Endgame, F/M, Female Character In Command, Female-Centric, Inspired By Tumblr, Inspired by Fanfiction, Meta, Metafiction, Multi-Era, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Past Relationship(s), Peggy Carter Lives, Relationship Discussions, Relationship(s), Sexism, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:48:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charleybradburies/pseuds/charleybradburies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or: Peggy and Steve have a very important love, but that doesn't mean it's True Love.</p><p> </p><p>  <span class="small">I was going to put this on Tumblr and it got too long for a text post I thought people might actually read, so I'm just going to post it here, but don't expect it to be super eloquent since it was written as a rant not an essay even though it kind of morphed into the latter.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	On 'Steadfast' and 'Immutable' Not Being Equivalent to One Another

Okay, I’m gonna say this nice and slow and straightforward for y’all in the back, because a lot of these widespread ideas are really irking and actually offending me, okay?

Yes, Steggy is a love story. But do you know what it is? Steggy is a “first love” story. It is a story about two people’s _first love._ **First.** Love. 

Life-changing? Yes. Heartbreaking? Absolutely. Strong, visceral, laughably awkward, heartwarming, memorable? Indeed.

Lifelong? _Not necessarily._

Not to say that the effects aren’t lifelong, or that people who experience their first “real” romantic love together won’t continue to care about each other for the whole of their lives - in this case, we know for a fact they do, and that **matters.** A lot. A _lot_ a lot - both for them and **literally** for the entire universe. And no, I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me that Peggy and Steve ever stop loving each other. 

But I think it’s not only unrealistic, but disrespectful to them both, especially Peggy, to imagine that they are still and/or will forever be **in** love with each other. 

Of course Steve is reeling from having lost the chance of a life with her. That’s an entire life, and not even one that he missed out on having by any direct choice of his own in relevance to their relationship - there was no hard break-up where they went their separate ways and then eventually, because the superhero world is only so big, stumbled upon each other again.

Steve, for (well, nearly) all intents and purposes in Peggy Carter’s life, **died.**

Gone. Dead. Deceased. Buried. In ice. Over ice. As I said, dead.

Any person who hadn’t had the Serum would have been frozen to death, and considering that the SSR hadn’t exactly tried to experiment with such a possibility, no one really could have expected that he would have survived. 

Steve Rogers **died.**

Peggy Carter **didn’t.**

Peggy Carter had a life before Steve Rogers, and she continued living after he died, even when she didn’t particularly want to keep going, and she **owned** it. She mourned, yes, and she was treated poorly for it, mostly because of her sex, which she was already being treated poorly for, and she, with increasingly impressive diplomacy, kept on keepin’ on. 

Peggy Carter is - _supposedly, although I do have an open help receipt with God on whether she’s actually an angel- He hasn’t gotten back to me yet on that_ \- human, in the way that all characters are. She’s allowed to hurt, grieve, love, scream, kick, punch, forget, kiss, and live, as she pleases, within the canon set out for her.

She’s **also** allowed to **move on.**

For Steve, in the current time period, it’s effectively been a couple of years. He hasn’t been aware of time passing, he hasn’t been awake, he hasn’t physically or emotionally aged. (He’s done a good bit of _maturing_ since he’s reentered the world - that’s another matter.) For him, they’ve only been apart for a couple of years. She’s still the love of his life, he can still remember what her voice sounded like when she told him not to be late for their date, what it was like when he bent down to kiss her in a moving car, how stunning she looked in that red dress, the feeling he got when she punched Gilmore Hodge in the jaw. 

But **Peggy?** Peggy’s lived all those years. Peggy’s been alive, and she’s been living. She’s been a founder of and a part of SHIELD, she’s been kicking ass - _and who knows, maybe there was some old dude pocketing good spoons that she recently busted for doing so, because why wouldn’t she still be kicking ass?_ \- and she’s had a whole **lifetime** to reflect, grow, and grieve. 

We know, canonically, that she gets married to a man - _who fought in the war and was at some point saved by Steve because, like I said, the superhero world is only so big_ \- and they have children. Now, there are multiple theories on who that is ~~even though it’s so definitely Daniel Sousa~~ but regardless of who it is, we have some general idea of what we want him to be like, and what Peggy would want him to be like.

And one major thing, I think? He should make Peggy **happy.**

Not “this is the best I got so I’ll take it” happy, not “he might make me laugh but the whole time I’m wishing he was you instead” pretend-happy. **Happy.**

She deserves that. (And well, it’s totally Daniel, and he deserves that, too.)

And it’s not that Steve _doesn’t,_ or that the fact that they didn’t settle down together wouldn’t ever cross her mind - it would, and it would be unfair to expect anything else. They **were** each other’s first love, after all.

But to want Peggy to have **stayed in love** with **Steve?** For all of her life? 

That would mean she spent seventy years pining. 

**Seventy years** wishing she’d done something different, wishing, maybe, that she **hadn’t** given the man she **loved** the _dignity_ of his choice, wanting something different or supposedly “more” than what she created for the world and for herself. However many years she and her children have been alive, with the vestigial guilt that someone other than Steve had fathered them. However long she was or has been married, looking down at her ring finger and looking at her life, looking into the eyes of the man in bed next to her at night, wanting him to be someone else.

And that would have been miserable for her and for everyone else involved.

Including Steve, who is the person that most people **claim** to be thinking of when they say that they want Peggy to still be _in love_ with him.

Peggy Carter deserves a **hell** of a lot better than that, and Steve Rogers is a textbook depiction of a good man, and I, personally, refuse to think lowly enough of him to think that he would want anything but the **best** for her. 

Yes, a part of him will always feel jealous, will always feel robbed, will always have the flickering wonder of whether he actually made the right choice. He **loves** her, and no amount of time is going to erase that at one point, he was **in** love with her and did think he had a damn good shot at maybe being with her forever. 

But just like people say about loved ones that have died, I _don’t_ think he would want her life to have stopped because of losing him, in any sense. 

I believe he respects the dignity of her choice too much for that.

And well, to be quite honest, if you think that _Steve’s_ feelings, and what _Steve_ wants or wanted, is **automatically** more important than _Peggy’s_ feelings, then a) you’re wrong and b) you should examine that. 

+

Never _done_ with what I have to say, but I'm gonna leave this here for the time being. Hope this gets someone thinking. (and hey, if a fic request comes of that thinking, who am I to tell you not to ask?) - xoxo, clara


End file.
